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Comment Re:If you've nothing to hide... (Score 5, Insightful) 878

by Teux (#33043774) Attached to: Facing 16 Years In Prison For Videotaping Police

I've always found the "to protect and serve" on police cars to be intensely ironic considering that they do neither.

Modern police serve mainly to try to keep the peace and to clean up after crimes. They come into most situations and arrest whoever is causing the most ruckus or is most uncooperative. They act like frustrated, tired parents who just want some quiet when they come home from work. Right and wrong mean a lot less then just getting everyone out of their hair.

Then comes the counselor act, where the cops show up after a crime. They assure everyone the that criminal will be caught (rare unless they are caught in the act of another crime) and clean up the mess a bit after pretending to care for a bit.

I'm sure my contempt for the police shows in this post, but I really do believe that as a whole we need more control of the people we allow to walk among us with guns.
Google

Google Tells Users To Drop IE6 426

Posted by CmdrTaco from the my-mom-still-won't-do-it dept.
Kelly writes "Google is now urging Gmail users to drop Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in favor of Firefox or Chrome. Google recently removed Firefox from the Google Pack bundle, replaced it with Chrome, then added a direct download link for Chrome on Google and YouTube. Google's decision to list IE6 as an unsupported Gmail browser does not affect just consumers: Tens of thousands of small- and mid-sized businesses that run Google Apps hosted services may dump IE6 as well. What's especially interesting is the fact that Mozilla is picking up two out of three browser users that Microsoft surrenders."
Privacy

Using Speed Cameras To Send Tickets To Your Enemies 898

Posted by kdawson from the ticket-me-elmo dept.
High school students in Maryland are using speed cameras to get back at their perceived enemies, and even teachers. The students duplicate the victim's license plate on glossy paper using a laser printer, tape it over their own plate, then speed past a newly installed speed camera. The victim gets a $40 ticket in the mail days later, without any humans ever having been involved in the ticketing process. A blog dedicated to driving and politics adds that a similar, if darker, practice has taken hold in England, where bad guys cruise the streets looking for a car similar to their own. They then duplicate its plates in a more durable form, and thereafter drive around with little fear of trouble from the police.
Security

New Password Recovery Technique Uses CPU and GPU Together 264

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the brute-force-just-means-get-a-bigger-hammer dept.
BaCa writes to mention that a new hardware/software combination has been created by a company called ElcomSoft that will reportedly allow cryptography professionals to build cheap PCs that work like supercomputers for the specific task of retrieving lost passwords. Utilizing a combination of the CPU and the GPU the task of brute forcing a password may be reduced by as much as a factor of 25. "Until recently, graphic cards' GPUs couldn't be used for applications such as password recovery. Older graphics chips could only perform floating-point calculations, and most cryptography algorithms require fixed-point mathematics. Today's chips can process fixed-point calculations. And with as much as 1.5 Gb of onboard video memory and up to 128 processing units, these powerful GPU chips are much more effective than CPUs in performing many of these calculations."
Space

Could Black Holes Be Portals to Other Universes? 277

Posted by Zonk from the oh-sliders-you've-taught-us-so-much dept.
David Shiga writes "Astronomers have identified many objects out there that they think are black holes. But could they be portals to other universes called wormholes, instead? According to a new study by a pair of physicists, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference. They have discovered that wormholes with the right shape would look identical to black holes from the outside. But while a trip into a black hole would mean certain death, a wormhole might spit you out into a parallel universe with its own stars and planets. Exotic effects from quantum physics might produce wormholes naturally from collapsing stars, one of the physicist says, and they might even be produced in future particle accelerator experiments."

Feed DepthX Scours Ocean Floor (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed
An untethered, autonomous robot rummaging around a geothermal sinkhole may herald the future of deep ocean -- and deep space -- robotics. By Emmet Cole.


Operating Systems

Virtualization Is Not All Roses 214

Posted by CmdrTaco from the watch-out-for-those-thorns dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Vendors and magazines are all over virtualization like a rash, like it is the Saviour for IT-kind. Not always, writes analyst Andi Mann in Computerworld." I've found that when it works, it's really cool, but it does add a layer of complexity that wasn't there before. Then again, having a disk image be a 'machine' is amazingly useful sometimes.
Security

Submission + - SSL optimization over the WAN needs scrutiny

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "With more and more WAN optimization vendors extending their capabilities to include encrypted traffic, corporate IT executives have a decision to make: Should they trust the security these devices provide? Rather than passing through SSL sessions between clients and servers located in remote data centers, some WAN optimization gear can terminate the SSL sessions, shrink the traffic and re-encrypt it for the next leg of the trip. These chains of encrypted sessions introduce potential vulnerabilities that different vendors address in different ways. SSL traffic represents a growing percentage of total traffic on WAN links, according to Forrester Research. So SSL support in WAN optimization appliances will become more important to businesses that want to keep traffic secure while minimizing the size of their WAN links. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/030807-ssl-o ptimization.html"
Power

Submission + - Wind, Solar & Biofuels to Power Remote Cell To

Submitted by
tcd004
tcd004 writes: "How do you set up a cell network when there's no power grid? Namibia, India and Nigeria are building towers using localized power soucres to provide critical cell phone access to the most remote parts of their countries. Wind/solar hybrids, and biofuel power plants will power the radio towers, peripheral communications, and even the protective fencing around the installations."
Businesses

Submission + - Selling Homeowners a Solar Dream

Submitted by
slugo
slugo writes: "Instead of making you spring for $25,000 or more in gear, Citizenr says it will loan you a complete rooftop solar power system, install it for free and sell you back the power it generates at a fixed rate below what your utility charges. The company hopes to make back its investment with those monthly payments, augmented by federal tax credits and rebates."
Internet Explorer

After 100M IE7 Downloads, Firefox Still Gaining 425

Posted by kdawson from the denting-the-monopoly dept.
Kelson writes "Internet Explorer 7 hit the 100 million download mark last week. Yet in the three months it's been available, Firefox's market share has continued to grow. InformationWeek reports that nearly all of IE7's growth has been upgrades from IE6. People don't seem to be switching back to IE in significant numbers, prompting analysts to wonder: has Microsoft finally met its match?"
Toys

How They Make LEGO Bricks 327

Posted by CmdrTaco from the mana-from-heaven dept.
harajukboy writes "Businessweek.com shows us how the famous LEGO bricks are made. Among the new facts I picked up was that LEGO is the largest tire manufacturer in the world, and that the process is so air tight that only 18 of 1 million pieces are considered defective." I knew I was getting old when I first realized that these kids today with their modern legos have it too easy, what with all those crazy custom pieces. Why, when I was a kid, we had to use our imagination to build stuff.

A Buckyegg Breaks Pentagon Rules 137

Posted by Zonk from the gotta-break-some-eggs-to-well-you-know dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Chemists from Virginia and California have cooked a soup of fullerenes which produced an improbable buckyegg. The egg-shaped structure of their 'buckyballs' was a complete surprise for the researchers. In fact, they wanted to trap some atoms of terbium in a buckyball "to make compounds that could be both medically useful and well-tolerated in the body." And they obtained a buckyegg which both violates some chemistry laws and the FIFA soccer laws which were used until the last World Cup. Read more for additional references and a picture of this buckyegg carrying metal molecules."

Panasonic May Relaunch In-flight Broadband 109

Posted by samzenpus from the surf-the-friendly-skies dept.
Glenn Fleishman writes "Panasonic's avionics division may relaunch Connexion by Boeing by using similar technology that's better, cheaper, and lighter. The company said today that they were looking to get airlines to commit to 500 planes within 60 days, and already had 150 aircraft committed. They'd still use Ku band, but have a cheaper and smaller set of leases. Connexion had at least $120m in yearly fixed expenses, a large part of which was transponder licenses. The new service would provide 12 Mbps down and 3 Mbps (versus Connexion's 5 Mbps/1 Mbps), and be priced conceivably as low as $10 per session wholesale, with airlines choosing to not mark up rates. With that higher rate, even with latency, in-flight VoIP seems more achievable at a reasonable cost, although some airlines may choose to block VoIP services. I reported for The Economist magazine last week about mobile phones in flight (services coming in Europe in 2007). Three U.S. airlines told me that American passengers have very low interest or negative interest in allowing any voice (cell or otherwise) during flights. Europeans, with shorter flights and lower expectations of privacy perhaps, are more open to it." We covered the story back when Boeing decided to scrap Connexion.

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